Being able to leverage both automated and human support has led to some incredible advancements, allowing companies to scale their support and deliver personalized experiences more efficiently than ever before.As a result, human support is more critical than ever. And with a greater impact on your customer satisfaction – and ultimately your company’s bottom line – it’s increasingly important to invest in your human support team as a real strategic lever in your business.

Invest in your human support team

The three layers of the Conversational Support Funnel consists of three layers:<ul><li>Proactive support enables you to get ahead of known problems before customers even reach out for help.</li><li>Self-serve support allows users to resolve simple queries on their own, ensuring fast, efficient answers while minimizing the number of repetitive questions hitting your team inbox.</li><li>Finally, there’s human support, which is crucial for those tricky issues that can only be solved by a real-life person. These are the technical or sensitive queries that need a specialized, empathetic response.</li></ul>

The business benefits of human support

Human support is crucial for those tricky or sensitive issues that just can’t be solved with automation or bots, such as payment problems, difficult technical issues, or complex queries that need deeper context. Being able to route these problems to a real person is essential for maintaining customer happiness.What’s more, these are also great opportunities to enhance loyalty and advocacy by building real long-term customer relationships through personalized, tailored problem-solving and genuine human connection at key moments of your customer’s journey.

Engage and retain your customers

<ul><li>Map out career paths. Having clearly defined career paths gives people something to work towards.&nbsp;</li><li>Rethink your metrics to properly reflect the work. While it’s great that support reps can really get their teeth into complex problems and pull apart issues, it also means that the problems they’re working on can take longer and be more difficult to solve.&nbsp;</li><li>Treat humans like humans. This means that if things feel overwhelming, your support reps have time to step away from the inbox and go for a walk, and they’re not constantly in thrall to their numbers. As a manager, you also need to be deliberate about making your team’s escalation paths clear. It’s important for them to know that they don’t have to sit there and deal with something that’s not going anywhere.</li></ul>

3 human strategies to support your support team

Support teams have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. Here's why human support is so crucial – and how to get the most out of your team.

Stashed ideas

How support leaders can empower their teams to satisfy, delight, and retain customers

Some conversations become difficult due to several factors.<ul><li dir = "auto">It could be due to differences in people's expectations.</li><li dir = "auto">Miscommunication can contribute to misaligned expectations.</li><li dir = "auto">Emotions often steer people's conversations. Your customer may have a bad day or get confused.</li></ul> Most tough situations can be avoided by understanding your customer's expectations and aligning them with the business's goals.

Difficult customer conversations

Non-verbal cues can affect conversations with your stakeholders. For example: <ul><li>You make faces when you don't agree with something.</li><li>You avoid eye contact.</li><li>You show less interest in the conversation.</li><li>You cross your arms and are not ready to agree with anything.</li><li>You raise your voice in an attempt to prove your point.</li><li>You only focus on the negative points instead of balancing them with positive ones.</li></ul>

Elements which worsen difficult conversations

Examples of difficult conversations:<ul><li>The customer has decided not to renew yet to pitch as a last chance.</li><li>You and your team unexpectedly failed a customer, but you have a conversation and act in a way that will win their trust back.</li><li>If you're a leader, letting someone go.</li><li>Changing the topic to move from a tactical to a strategic discussion.</li><li>Taking responsibility for the team for any failures.</li></ul>

Courageous but difficult customer conversations

<ul><li>Don't be judgemental. Suppress the desire to be judgemental. Often, the customer's anger and frustration are because of genuine concerns.</li><li>Start with why to get to the root cause. Why is the conversation important? What am I missing? What am I assuming?</li><li>Listen actively. Pay attention to what the customer says and acknowledge the problem so that they feel heard.</li><li>Let the customers say what they have to say. Mirror back what your customers said to create trust and confidence.</li><li>Wear the problem-solving hat. Try to give acceptable customer solutions that are within the firm's guidelines.</li></ul>

How to handle tough conversations

<ul><li>Mindset shift or perspective shift is essential before you speak to the customer.</li><li>Do your homework. Ensure you understand the customer and the problem.</li><li>Apologise and be empathetic. Be quick to apologise for the inconvenience caused. This will calm the customer down before the actual conversation.</li><li>Listen actively to the concerns.</li><li>Address customer concerns honestly.</li><li>Try to find a solution together if you're unable to resolve the issue.</li><li>Hold your ground. Tell them what is acceptable and what not to ensure you and your customer are on the same page.</li><li>Focus on building relationships.</li></ul>

Lessen difficult customer conversation

What are difficult customer conversations? Examples of difficult customer conversation. How to handle difficult customer conversations

Difficult customer conversation- How to handle them?

Using accessibility guidelines to communicate with your customers really can improve their support experience.&nbsp;Your customers come from many different backgrounds. You can't always tell who has dyslexia or anxiety, who's visually impaired, or who isn't a native speaker of your language. But if you consistently use accessibility tools in your response, you can accommodate every single one of them.

An accessible support experience

<ul><li>Provide instructions in the order that the customer needs to do them. Don't assume what your customers know either. List every step that they need to follow to complete a task.</li><li>Use headings, bullet points, and numbered lists. They provide a visual break for readers and improve readability.</li></ul>

Follow a logical order

Write clearly, and get to the point, so they can solve their problems faster.<ul><li>Use simple words and phrases. Avoid using idioms and unnecessary technical jargon. Customers may not be familiar with them, and translation apps may mistranslate them.</li><li>Use consistent words, terms, and phrases. Synonyms are great for creative writing. They aren't great for accessibility. If you use "submit" to define what a customer should do, don't use "enter" later.</li><li>Define acronyms and abbreviations. If possible, don't use them at all. If you have to use them, define them when they first appear.</li><li>Don't use directional language that requires your customer to see the layout of a website. Some people with low or no vision use screen readers, so they'll perceive the page differently.</li></ul>

Write so your customers can understand

<ul><li>&nbsp;Keep it simple when you're writing to someone who is really upset. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to send a simple email saying, "No, we can't do that."</li><li>Avoid using too many independent clauses in a sentence. Independent clauses are parts of a sentence that express a complete thought. If you separated them out, they would still make a complete sentence.</li></ul>

Be concise

Even if your response is clear to you, it may not be clear to the customer. When you restate your point, your customer has another opportunity to understand you. Repetition drives your point home.

Repeat yourself

Images and videos should be used to complement text, not replace it. They can be helpful, but they're not always accessible to all customers. Make sure to fully describe what's in an image or video. Only use images to enhance or clarify meaning.

Never substitute images or videos for words

How to use accessible writing in your customer support

Conversational support is the modern way to resolve customer questions through a digital-first, messaging-based interaction. This means that customers and agents can be connected in real-time or asynchronously, and customers can stop and restart the conversation when it’s convenient – without ever losing context.It’s called conversational because it, well, feels more like an ongoing conversation: natural, easy, and convenient.

Conversational Support

The tone of voice may be the single most important factor in support performance. The tone you take with a customer will go a long way towards determining the quality of their support experience.&nbsp;No matter how helpful you are, if you communicate with impatience, condescension, or disinterest, then their experience will be negative.&nbsp;

Customer Support: Why Tone Is So Important 

<ul><li>Proud: Make bold decisions about which features to build.&nbsp;</li><li>Responsible: If a bad feature or bug ships and a customer is disappointed or frustrated, it’s on you, as a company.&nbsp;</li><li>Empathetic: Acknowledge, and aim to truly understand how your customers feel and handle each conversation accordingly.&nbsp;</li><li>Articulate: Gracefully augmenting your conversations with personal language, emojis and GIFs is encouraged, but typos, bad punctuation or poor phrasing make you look less professional.&nbsp;</li><li>Concise: No matter how much fun you can have with your customers, never forget they contacted you for a reason.&nbsp;</li><li>Human: Really connect with your customers, and if you wouldn’t say the words in a “normal” spoken interaction, don’t say them during a customer interaction.</li></ul>

The PREACH Framework For Customer Support Tone

Hit the right notes every time and create empathetic, long-lasting customer relationships by harnessing the power of tone of voice.

PREACH: A tone of voice framework for customer support

Multilingual support - speaking in your customer's language - can benefit a company. Research shows that 75 per cent of customers want to buy from brands that offer product information in their own language. While a company cannot offer all information in every language, extending the communication of the essential aspects in the native language can increase customer satisfaction.

Multi-language support

Speaking in a customer's language offers various benefits: <ul><li>It increases sales. Almost 74% of customers will buy again if a company offers after-sales service in their native language.</li><li>Access to a wider market. Nearly 70% of customers worldwide offered positive feedback when brands provided multilingual customer services.</li><li>Speaking in a customer's language earn their loyalty and trust that could result in long-term benefits.</li><li>Multilingual support can prevent misunderstandings that could arise from miscommunication.</li></ul>

The importance of multi-language customer support

A brand needs to be aware of the various methods through which one can incorporate multilingual support. Methods include:<ul><li>translation tools</li><li>hire talent</li><li>localise important pages</li><li>multilingual chatbot support. Chatbots can cut operational costs by about 30 per cent. </li></ul>

How to adopt multilingual support

Multilingual support comes with its benefits, such as accessing a wider market and building loyalty. Let’s look at how companies can get closer to their customers by speaking their language

customersupport

Invest in your human support team

How support leaders can empower their teams to satisfy, delight, and retain customers

Difficult customer conversations

Difficult customer conversation- How to handle them?